Alford adjusts to life as Blue Jays' top prospect

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Even to a professional scout’s trained eyes, a single batting-practice session in the earliest days of spring training, without context, means next to nothing. Without knowing specifics of what guys are working on — who’s just tracking the ball, who’s working out a small mechanical kink in his swing, who’s trying to drive pitches to the opposite field — it’s silly for anyone to put any stock in only a handful of swings, and downright pointless for a layperson to attempt to draw any real conclusions.

But even knowing all that, it was impossible to watch young Blue Jays outfielder Anthony Alford take his cuts recently and not come away dreaming on possibilities. With athleticism obvious from his stature alone and an audible whoosh every time his bat whipped through the zone, Alford smashed a series of drives that pelted or cleared the left-field fence on a practice field at Toronto’s facility, and made it easy to see why Baseball America recently ranked him the No. 25 prospect in all of baseball and the best in the Blue Jays’ system.

Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Anthony Alford smiles as he throws at a spring training baseball workout in Dunedin, Fla., last week. Alford is a former Petal High two-sport star.

And then there’s this: Alford wasn’t even a full-time baseball player until last season. A two-sport star at Petal High, Alford became the first person ever to win Mississippi’s Mr. Football and Mr. Baseball honors in the same year and was named MaxPreps.com’s 2011-12 Boys Athlete of the Year after a senior campaign that saw him notch 20 passing touchdowns and 24 rushing touchdowns then hit .483 with an .805 slugging percentage come baseball season. Now 21, Alford played quarterback for Southern Miss as a freshman in 2012, then transferred to Ole Miss and played safety in 2014, all while spending his summers making scant appearances in the Blue Jays’ minor-league system after the organization drafted him in the third round of the 2012 draft.

After getting married in July of 2014, Alford gave up football and committed himself to playing professional baseball, traveling to Australia for winter ball that offseason, then endeavoring his first full season in the minors in 2015. It went well: Splitting the season between Class A Lansing and Class A Advanced Dunedin, Alford hit .298 with an .820 OPS across 107 games, stealing 27 bases in 34 attempts along the way.

“He was feeling his way around here last spring, but you could tell there’s something in there,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said Wednesday. “Everybody says he has probably made more strides in one season than most guys they’ve ever seen. He’s got a ton of talent, he really does. He’s a great athlete, but he was a football player, so he needed to play baseball. Once they started throwing him out there every day, it started happening.”

“I learned a lot over my first full season,” Alford told USA TODAY Sports. “I learned it’s a grind, playing everyday. I had a few ups and downs, I hit a few rough patches, but I didn’t stay in them long. So I just learned that you can’t let five or ten at-bats determine how you’re feeling or how you’re going about things; you’ve just got to stick to what you know and try to stay consistent. It’s all mental.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given his college-football caliber frame, Alford did not show the same home-run power he demonstrated in batting-practice this week in games in 2015, hitting only four home runs in 413 at-bats. But hitting homers was not something he focused on: He was a leadoff hitter, determined to reach base safely.

“Before last year, I had less than 100 at-bats under my belt over a three year span, so how can you expect me to come in and hit .300 and drop 15 bombs?” he said. “It’s just not going to happen. I just want to stick to what I can do. I was a leadoff batter, and I found myself in a lot of two-strike counts. I was just working to try to get on base anyway I can. And I barreled up a lot of balls — I had a lot of extra-base hits, so it wasn’t like I was just slapping singles around. The power’s going to come; I’ve just got to stick to what I do, and I can’t let what the people on the outside try to change my game for me.”

For a player with relatively little experience in pro baseball, Alford showed a surprisingly polished approach at the plate last season, reaching base on balls 67 times in 487 plate appearances and maintaining an excellent .398 on-base percentage. He credits that success to hitting coach Kenny Graham, with whom he worked both in Australia and in Lansing.

Alford admitted that he misses the atmosphere that comes with Division I football, especially when comparing them to the small crowds typical of Florida State League contests. But he said his decision to drop football, which he made because he knew baseball offered a clearer route for him to provide for his family, helped renew his appreciation for the sport he now plays eight months a year.

“I started to get that love back for baseball,” Alford said. “I always just played baseball because I was good at it, but in 2014, something just happened. I just gained that love back.”

Already boasting a reputation as a great defensive outfielder and with a successful half-season at the Class A Advanced on his resume, Alford could start 2016 with Toronto’s Class AA club in New Hampshire. And while Alford appears unlikely to reach the big-league club before the end of this season, Gibbons seems to recognize that the former college quarterback and safety now owns a bright future in baseball.

“Baseball’s a tough game to play, and there’s a lot of great athletes out there that can’t do it,” Gibbons said. “He started moving in the right direction. Last time I saw, he’s viewed as our top prospect. I can see why.”